A Walk to Remember (6 page)

Oops.

I think he would have hit me right there, but Jamie suddenly worked her way into the situation.

“Don’t I know you?” she said cheerfully,
looking right at him. Sometimes Jamie seemed oblivious of situations that were happening right in front of her. “Wait—yes, I do. You work in the garage downtown. Your father’s name is Joe, and your grandma lives out on

A look of confusion crossed
Lew’s
face, as though he were trying to put together a puzzle with too many pieces.

“How do you know all that? What he’d do, tell you about me, too?”

“No,” Jamie said, “don’t be silly.” She laughed to herself. Only Jamie could find
humor
at a time like this. “I saw your picture in your grandma’s house. I was walking by, and she needed some help bringing in the groceries. Your picture was on the mantel.”

Lew
was looking at Jamie as though she had cornstalks growing out of her ears.

Meanwhile Jamie was fanning herself with her hand. “Well, we were just sitting down to take a breather from all that dancing. It sure gets hot out there. Would you like to join us? We’ve got a couple of chairs. I’d love to hear how your grandma is doing.”

She sounded so happy about it that
Lew
didn’t know what to do. Unlike those of us
who were used to this sort of thing, he’d never come across someone like Jamie before. He stood there for a moment or two, trying to decide if he should hit the guy with the girl who’d helped his grandma. If it sounds confusing to you, imagine what it was doing to
Lew’s
petroleum-damaged brain.

He finally skulked off without responding, taking Angela with him. Angela had probably forgotten how the whole thing started anyway, owing to the amount she’d had to drink. Jamie and I watched him go, and when he was a safe distance away, I exhaled. I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding my breath.

“Thanks,” I said mumbled sheepishly, realizing that Jamie—Jamie!—was the one who’d saved me from grave bodily harm.

Jamie looked at me strangely. “For what?” she asked, and when I didn’t exactly spell it out for her, she went right back into her story about Bible school, as if nothing had happened at all. But this time I found myself actually listening to her, at least with one of my ears. It was the least I could do.

It turns out that it wasn’t the last we saw of either
Lew
or Angela that evening. The two glasses of punch had really done Angela in,
and she threw up all over the ladies’ rest room.
Lew
, being the classy guy he was, left when he heard her retching, sort of slinking out the way he came in, and that was the last I saw of him. Jamie, as fate would have it, was the one who found Angela in the bathroom, and it was obvious that Angela wasn’t doing too well. The only option was to clean her up and take her home before the teachers found out about it. Getting drunk was a big deal back then, and she’d be looking at suspension, maybe even expulsion, if she got caught.

Jamie, bless her heart, didn’t want that to happen any more than I did, though I would have thought otherwise if you’d asked me beforehand, owing to the fact that Angela was a minor and in violation of the law. She’d also broken another one of
Hegbert’s
rules for proper
behavior
.
Hegbert
frowned on law-breaking
and
drinking, and though it didn’t get him going like fornication, we all knew he was deadly serious, and we assumed Jamie felt the same way. And maybe she did, but her helper instinct must have taken over. She probably took one look at Angela and thought “wounded critter” or something like that and took immediate charge of the
situation. I went off and located Eric behind the bleachers, and he agreed to stand guard at the bathroom door while Jamie and I went in to tidy it up. Angela had done a marvelous job, I tell you. The puke was everywhere except the toilet. The walls, the floor, the sinks—even on the ceiling, though don’t ask me how she did that. So there I was, perched on all fours, cleaning up puke at the homecoming dance in my best blue suit, which was exactly what I had wanted to avoid in the first place. And Jamie, my date, was on all fours, too, doing exactly the same thing.

I could practically hear Carey laughing a squeaky, maniacal laugh somewhere in the distance.

We ended up sneaking out the back door of the gym, keeping Angela stable by walking on either side of her. She kept asking where
Lew
was, but Jamie told her not to worry. She had a real soothing way of talking to Angela, though Angela was so far gone, I doubt if she even knew who was speaking. We loaded Angela into the backseat of my car, where she passed out almost immediately, although not before she’d vomited once more on the floor of the car. The smell was so awful that we had to roll down the windows to keep
from gagging, and the drive to Angela’s house seemed extra long. Her mother answered the door, took one look at her daughter, and brought her inside without
so
much as a word of thanks. I think she was embarrassed, and we really didn’t have much to say to her anyway. The situation pretty much spoke for itself.

By the time we dropped
her
off it was ten forty-five, and we drove straight back to Jamie’s. I was really worried when we got there because of the way she looked and smelled, and I said a silent prayer hoping that Hegbert wasn’t awake. I didn’t want to have to explain this to him. Oh, he’d probably listen to Jamie if she was the one who told him about it, but I had the sinking feeling that he’d find a way to blame me anyway.

So I walked her to the door, and we stood outside under the
porchlight
. Jamie crossed her arms and smiled a little, looking just as if she’d come in from an evening stroll where she’d contemplated the beauty of the world.

“Please don’t tell your father about this,” I said.

“I won’t,” she said. She kept on smiling when she finally turned my way. “I had a
good time tonight. Thank you for taking me to the dance.”

Here she was, covered in puke, actually thanking me for the evening. Jamie Sullivan could really drive a guy crazy sometimes.

I
n the two weeks following the homecoming dance, my life pretty much returned to normal. My father was back in Washington,
D.C.
, which made things a lot more fun around my house, primarily because I could sneak out the window again and head to the graveyard for my late night forays. I don’t know what it was about the graveyard that attracted us so. Maybe it had something to do with the tombstones themselves, because as far as tombstones went, they were actually fairly comfortable to sit on.

We usually sat in a small plot where the Preston family had been buried about a hundred years ago. There were eight tombstones there,
all arranged in a circle, making it easy to pass the boiled peanuts back and forth between us. One time my friends and I decided to learn what we could about the Preston family, and we went to the library to find out if anything had been written about them. I mean, if you’re going to sit on someone’s tombstone, you might as well know something about them, right?

It turns out that there wasn’t much about the family in the historical records, though we did find out one interesting
tidbit
of information. Henry Preston, the father, was a one-armed lumberjack, believe it or not. Supposedly he could cut down a tree as fast as any two-armed man. Now the vision of a one-armed lumberjack is pretty vivid right off the bat, so we talked about him a lot. We used to wonder what else he could do with only one arm, and we’d spend long hours discussing how fast he could pitch a baseball or whether or not he’d be able to swim across the Intracoastal Waterway. Our conversations weren’t exactly
highbrow
, I admit, but I enjoyed them nonetheless.

Well, Eric and
me
were out there one Saturday night with a couple of other friends, eating boiled peanuts and talking about Henry
Preston, when Eric asked me how my “date” went with Jamie Sullivan. He and I hadn’t seen much of each other since the homecoming dance because the football season was already in the playoffs and Eric had been out of town the past few weekends with the team.

“It was okay,” I said, shrugging, doing my best to play it cool.

Eric playfully elbowed me in the ribs, and I grunted. He outweighed me by at least thirty pounds.

“Did you kiss her good-night?”

“No.”

He took a long drink from his can of Budweiser as I answered. I don’t know how he did it, but Eric never had trouble buying beer, which was strange, being that everyone in town knew how old he was.

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, tossing me a sidelong glance.

“I would have thought that after she helped you clean the bathroom, you would have at least kissed her good night.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Did you even try?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She’s not that kind of girl,” I said, and even
though we all knew it was true, it still sounded like I was defending her.

Eric latched on to that like a leech.

“I think you like her,” he said.

“You’re full of crap,” I answered, and he slapped my back, hard enough to force the breath right out of me. Hanging out with Eric usually meant that I’d have a few bruises the following day.

“Yeah, I might be full of crap,” he said, winking at me, “but you’re the one who’s smitten with Jamie Sullivan.”

I knew we were treading on dangerous ground.

“I was just using her to impress Margaret,” I said. “And with all the love notes she’s been sending me lately, I reckon it must have worked.”

Eric laughed aloud, slapping me on the back again.

“You and Margaret—now
that’s
funny. . . .”

I knew I’d just dodged a major bullet, and I breathed a sigh of relief as the conversation spun off in a new direction. I joined in now and then, but I wasn’t really listening to what they were saying. Instead I kept hearing this little voice inside me that made me wonder about what Eric had said.

The thing was, Jamie was probably the best date I could have had that night, especially considering how the evening turned out. Not many dates—heck, not many people, period—would have done what she did. At the same time, her being a good date didn’t mean I liked her. I hadn’t talked to her at all since the dance, except when I saw her in drama class, and even then it was only a few words here and there. If I liked her at all, I told myself, I would have wanted to talk to her. If I liked her, I would have offered to walk her home. If I liked her, I would have wanted to bring her to Cecil’s Diner for a basket of hushpuppies and some RC cola. But I didn’t want to do any of those things. I really didn’t. In my mind, I’d already served my penance.

The next day, Sunday, I was in my room, working on my application to UNC. In addition to the transcripts from my high school and other personal information, they required five essays of the usual type. If you could meet one person in history, who would that person be and why? Name the most significant influence in your life and why you feel that way. What do you look for in a role model and why? The essay questions were fairly
predictable—our English teacher had told us what to expect—and I’d already worked on a couple of variations in class as homework.

English was probably my best subject. I’d never received anything lower than an A since I first started school, and I was glad the emphasis for the application process was on writing. If it had been on math, I might have been in trouble, especially if it included those algebra questions that talked about the two trains leaving an hour apart,
traveling
in opposite directions at forty miles an hour, etc. It wasn’t that I was bad in math—I usually pulled at least a C—but it didn’t come naturally to me, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I was writing one of my essays when the phone rang. The only phone we had was located in the kitchen, and I had to run downstairs to grab the receiver. I was breathing so loudly that I couldn’t make out the voice too well, though it sounded like Angela. I immediately smiled to myself. Even though she’d been sick all over the place and I’d had to clean it up, she was actually pretty fun to be around most of the time. And her dress really had been something, at least for the first hour. I figured she was probably calling to thank me
or even to get together for a barbecue sandwich and hushpuppies or something.